Prosopagnosia is a visual disorder in which patients have marked difficulties in perceiving and remembering faces. Prosopagnosia can be caused by an acute brain injury such as stroke (quite rare), degenerative processes such as aging or dementia (more common, but still somewhat rare), or from hereditary and developmental factors (quite common, ˜1 in 100 in the general population). At the perceptual level, prosopagnosics are overwhelmed with visual details and have particular difficulties at visually integrating parts into a coherent whole. Specifically, it has been shown that prosopagnosics have deficits on tasks that require discriminating multiple spatial relationships at once. These deficits particularly affect face perception and identification, which involves rapidly computing spatial relations among inner face components and integrating this information into a holistic percept. In addition to general face recognition deficits in prosopagnosia, normal face perceivers show difficulties perceiving and remembering faces from races that they have little experience with compared to faces from races they have extensive experience with. This is called the ‘other race effect’ and is partly due to a more piecemeal processing style of facial features with other race faces and a more integrative and holistic processing style applied to familiar race faces. In addition to deficits in processing other race faces in normal subjects and prosopagnosia, there are also individuals with superior face perception and face memory abilities. These individuals are able to rapidly integrate the spatial configuration of facial features. Thus, training this integration process in prosopagnosics and normal perceivers may enhance deficient face processing abilities, abolish deficits in processing other race faces, and may improve normal face perception and memory into the superior range.
The present invention provides a method and apparatus for not only treating prosopagnosics but also training normal individuals to recognize faces more effectively. Such training has particular application in the security and law enforcement fields.